Enlarge/ Just imagine how many 20-minute Game of Thrones episodes you could watch if you lived as long as Melisandre. (credit: HBO)

As AT&T prepares to purchase Time Warner Inc., AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has an idea for HBO’s Game of Thrones: cut the hour-long episodes down to 20 minutes for mobile devices.

AT&T’s $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner would give the telco HBO and other lucrative programming properties. Stephenson discussed his thoughts yesterday at the annual JP Morgan Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Boston.

“I’ll cause [HBO CEO Richard] Plepler to panic,” Stephenson said. But “think about things like Game of Thrones. In a mobile environment, a 60-minute episode might not be the best experience. Maybe you want a 20-minute episode.” Instead of showing full-length episodes on all devices, it might be best to “curate the content uniquely for a mobile environment.”

At least three federal agencies are now investigating Universal Health Services over allegations that its psychiatric hospitals keep patients longer than needed in order to milk insurance companies, Buzzfeed News reports.

According to several sources, the UHS’ chain of psychiatric facilities—the largest in the country—will delay patients’ discharge dates until the day insurance coverage runs out, regardless of the need of the patient. Because the hospitals are reimbursed per day, the practice extracts the maximum amount of money from insurance companies. It also can be devastating to patients, who are needlessly kept from returning to their jobs and families. To cover up the scheme, medical notes are sometimes altered and doctors come up with excuses, such as medication changes, sources allege. Employees say they repeatedly hear the phrase: “don’t leave days on the table.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has been investigating UHS for several years, as Buzzfeed has previously reported. UHS, a $12 billion company, gets a third of its revenue from government insurance providers. In 2013, HHS issued subpoenas to 10 UHS psychiatric hospitals.

In efforts to compete with streaming TV services, some networks are looking to make their own “skinny” TV bundles. At the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Boston this week, Viacom CEO Bob Bakish explained that the company is in talks with at least one multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) to be part of an entertainment-only, slimmed-down TV bundle that would cost between $10 and $20 per month.

This type of package would include entertainment channels only and exclude sports entirely, gearing it toward customers who want a cheaper TV bundle and don’t care about sports programming. Bakish criticized current TV streaming offerings for not being “transformational” since they still require customers to pay for content they don’t want, namely sports networks. According to Bakish, the true transformational plan will be one that provides customers with “a new entry segment at a much lower price point” with optional sports programming.

Live sports is a huge deal for most over-the-top streaming services, as it is for social media outlets that have been focusing more on live video. Services like YouTube TV and Hulu with Live TV highlight the number of sports networks included in their $35 to $40 price tags, while Twitter and Facebook have obtained rights to stream various sports broadcasts over social media in the past couple years.

IKEA recently released its own line of Wi-Fi enabled smart lighting called Trådfri. While great value—prices start at just £15 for a bulb and dimmer—the Trådfri range was limited to use with the Swedish furniture retailer’s own app and hardware remotes.

Now, IKEA is bringing Trådfri up to speed with the competition by adding support for voice control via Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri. Voice functionality will trickle out across the range starting this summer and running through to autumn. The update makes Trådfri one of the most affordable smart lighting solutions available.

Individual bulbs retail between £9 and £12, with the Wi-Fi hub costing £25. A bundle of bulb and dimmer switch costs £15, while a bundle of bulb and motion sensor costs £25. By contrast, similar Philips Hue bulbs sell for £15, and a motion sensor costs £35 without an included bulb. The Philips Hue starter kit does come in cheaper at £60, but the £70 Trådfri “Gateway kit” contains two bulbs, a Wi-Fi hub, plus an extra remote.

That the new HMD-made Nokia 3310 was the star of this year’s Mobile World Congress says more about how dull smartphones have become than it does about the appeal of Nokia’s chintzy slab of noughties nostalgia.

Despite the retro appeal, the Nokia 3310 (buy here) is little more than a Nokia 150 (a basic feature phone that sells for a mere £20) wrapped up in a curved glossy shell and sold for a millennial-gouging £50. It is, for all intents and purposes, a fashion statement—a phone for the beard-grooming, braces-wearing festival set that think tapping out texts on a T9 keyboard is the ultimate irony.

To ensure the long-term survival of humankind, we might as well shoot for the Moon.

In 2013, Japanese researchers did just that by launching freeze-dried mouse sperm into space. The goal was to see if mammalian swimmers can maintain their spunk amid harsh cosmic radiation—which they’ll undoubtedly have to endure for humans to thrive in the coming space age. The result: after nine months on the International Space Station (ISS), sperm did show signs of DNA damage, but they were still able to produce healthy, fertile offspring.

This is good news, the authors explain in PNAS. “In the future, humans likely will live on large-scale space stations or in other space habitats for several years or even over many generations,” they write. To maintain genetic diversity in small colonies, treat infertility, and breed domestic animals in our future interstellar homes, preserved sperm and eggs may be critical.

Remember that part in Casino Royale when Bond sips his martini, realizes he has been poisoned, then rushes out to his Aston Martin to inject himself with the antidote that Q thoughtfully stashed beforehand? This is exactly like that. Except, instead of Daniel Craig (*sigh*), it’s with worm larvae.

The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is a favorite laboratory model organism of geneticists and developmental biologists, mainly because it is simple, transparent, and easy to grow in bulk. Most worm researchers use the standard N2 strain, typically called the Bristol strain because it was isolated from mushroom compost in Bristol, England, in 1951.

Having a common reference strain like this is undoubtedly useful for labs spread across the world. But, like all species, C. elegans harbors genetic variability. Studies of wild strains can yield insights that would be missed if we assumed that N2 represented the entirety of worm genetics.

The Amiga computer was a legend in its time. Back when the Macintosh had only a monochrome 9-inch screen, and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps, the Amiga boasted a 32-bit graphical operating system in full color with stereo-sampled sound and preemptive multitasking. It was like a machine from the future. But the Amiga’s parent company, Commodore, suffered from terminal mismanagement and folded in 1994, just as PCs and Macintoshes were catching up technologically. The platform, like many others before it, seemed to be at an end.

So when a brand new Amiga computer arrived at my doorstep in 2017, you can imagine it was quite a surprise. Accordingly, the Amiga X5000 is a curious beast. In some respects, it’s more closely related to its predecessors than either modern PCs or Macintoshes. Yet this is a fully current machine capable of taking on modern workloads. How such a device came to be is a fascinating story, but that’s not our goal today—let’s dive into what the experience of using the X5000 is like.

The X5000 was developed by A-EON, a company formed by Trevor Dickinson in 2009 to develop new PowerPC-based Amiga computers. It is powered by a custom PowerPC motherboard, supporting a dual-core Freescale CPU at various clock speeds up to 2.5GHz. The Amiga has a long history of PowerPC support, starting with add-on accelerator cards released in 1997 using the old Motorola 603 and 604 chips. And since the release of Amiga OS 4.0 in 2007, the operating system itself was recompiled to be PowerPC-native, and many Amiga applications have been rewritten to support this architecture.

A litigation brawl between Nokia and Apple over intellectual property has ended just five months after it started.

The companies said today they have settled all outstanding litigation and agreed to a patent license. While exact financial terms are confidential, Apple will be making an up-front cash payment to Nokia, followed by additional payments over the course of the agreement.

“This is a meaningful agreement between Nokia and Apple,” Maria Varsellona, Chief Legal Officer at Nokia, said in a statement. “It moves our relationship with Apple from being adversaries in court to business partners working for the benefit of our customers.”

A litigation brawl between Nokia and Apple over intellectual property has ended just five months after it started.

The companies said today they have settled all outstanding litigation and agreed to a patent license. While exact financial terms are confidential, Apple will be making an up-front cash payment to Nokia, followed by additional payments over the course of the agreement.

“This is a meaningful agreement between Nokia and Apple,” Maria Varsellona, Chief Legal Officer at Nokia, said in a statement. “It moves our relationship with Apple from being adversaries in court to business partners working for the benefit of our customers.”